LeBron and Melo Have Nothing on Eric Cantor

July 15, 2014

Your Fellow Americans

By MARK LEIBOVICH

“You know, people are hurting,” Eric Cantor admitted last month, shortly after his humiliating defeat in a Virginia Republican primary. But Cantor, it went without saying, was not one of them. While LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony shopped their talents around the N.B.A. this summer, Cantor was preparing for his own free agency. Fortunately for the former House majority leader, one truth remains self-evident in Washington: No matter how soundly you’ve been walloped by voters, “opportunities in the private sector” await.

Cantor is the latest example of Washington’s upward-failing, golden-parachuted, everybody-wins calculus. Even if he got his clock cleaned by an unknown economics professor, he remains — at least on paper — a five-tool Washington prospect. During his seven terms in Congress, Cantor became one of the most prodigious fund-raisers in the Republican Party; he performed numerous public services for politicians and captains of industry; he developed close ties to the banking and financial-service industries, his most generous campaign contributors; he is a lawyer; his wife, Diana, is a former vice president at Goldman Sachs. So it’s hardly a surprise that Cantor still wants to “find ways that I can be influential” and “continue that drive for solutions” — albeit, this time, with a seven-figure salary. “What seemed really bad at the time,” Cantor continued to Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week,” “may turn out to be really good.”

When Karl asked Cantor about his next move, it was only to be expected that he wasn’t closing any doors, revolving or otherwise. Here is a translation of Cantor’s multilayered responses to Karl’s relatively straightforward question: “Would you rule out becoming a lobbyist?”

Cantor: I don’t think that I want to be a lobbyist, but I do want to be — play a role in the public debate.

Translation: I am definitely not ruling that out.

Cantor: I’ve had a lot of experience, obviously, in the intersection of government, politics, issues affecting the global economy.

Translation: I’m waiting for your call, Goldman.

Cantor: I’ve been very gratified by the number of people that have reached out to me already.

Translation: The clock is ticking, folks.

The Cantor sweepstakes has become a source of fascination within the backslapping carousel of the capital. “He’s got a lot of private-sector friends he has done favors for,” says Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who now works for Deloitte & Touche. “I think it would be easy for him to become Eric Cantor Inc. and make a few million dollars a year.” After all, Cantor, whose net worth is already listed between $4.4 million and $14.3 million, will soon be unburdened by pesky House ethics and disclosures and restrictions. Given his contacts and pedigree, he could one day eclipse the Tauzin Line, which is named for the former Louisiana congressman Billy Tauzin, who made $11.6 million as a pharmaceutical lobbyist in 2010. Even if he follows the more modest route of Dick Gephardt, the former House majority leader, he’ll still do O.K. Gephardt, who played a convincing working-class hero during his two Democratic presidential campaigns, now runs a consulting firm that made $4.8 million in lobbying income alone last year.

There was a time, it’s worth remembering, when outgoing public officials would return to their farms, stores, law firms, medical practices or whatever quaint things the founders envisioned our citizen leaders doing after their public lives ended. In the 1970s, Davis worked for two Nebraska senators, Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska, each of whom wound up living out his days in the Cornhusker State. “You did not have the lobbying class that you have today,” Davis told me. In 1974, according to The Atlantic, 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Now half of all senators and 42 percent of representatives enter the field. And those numbers don’t include our former leaders who call themselves “policy advisers,” consultants or strategists. (“Unregistered lobbyists” is how they are known, winkingly, around town.) Or the fact that more than half the members of Congress — who tend to be well educated, well raised and well married to begin with — are already millionaires.

What’s notable is how naturally D.C. commentators have accepted the “monetization” of Cantor’s “contribution.” In an article in CQ Roll Call, Julian Ha, a headhunter at Heidrick & Struggles, urged Cantor’s staff members to “call in the chits they’ve been accumulating and cash them in.” In a National Journal article headlined “Eric Cantor’s Loss Could Be the Best Thing That’s Happened to Him,” one former Republican Capitol Hill aide and current lobbyist earnestly wondered, “The question is how rich does Eric Cantor want to be.” Chris Jones, an executive-search specialist, guessed that the answer was very, very rich. He suggested to Time that Cantor would move to New York and join a major investment bank. “I don’t think he’ll be a standard lobbyist at a law firm,” Jones said. “I think he’ll go big. . . . I think he’s a major power player.”

Therein lies the uncomfortable reality of our gilded capital. Cantor’s loss was widely attributed to his growing “out of touch” with his Richmond-area constituents — he had become too steeped in Washington’s machinations, too cuddled up with Wall Street, too beholden to the entrenched insider’s world. An oft-quoted factoid, courtesy of Open Secrets, is that Cantor’s campaign spent more money at Bobby Van’s steakhouses ($124,177) than David Brat, his opponent, did on his entire campaign ($122,792). Yet those qualities are precisely what now make him such a prized recruit in his next career. As Brat presciently noted on the campaign trail, “All the investment banks up in New York and Washington, whatever. . . . Instead of going to jail, where’d they go? They went on to Eric’s Rolodex.”

Cantor is, in some sense, living proof of the thing that most voters loathe about Washington: the notion that membership in its political class guarantees a win-for-life lottery ticket. Hillary Clinton’s recent claim that she and her husband were “dead broke” after leaving the White House was preposterous not because it was technically untrue (it was true, at least on paper, for a brief while) but because it ignored the reality that being a public servant has become a prerequisite to being a multimillionaire. While the Cantor sweepstakes continues, countless smaller parlor games ensue. For instance, will Jay Carney, who stepped down as White House press secretary in May, take his talents to MSNBC, like his predecessor Robert Gibbs? Will he start his own consulting shop (also like Gibbs) or simply embark on a regimen of paid lectures? Gibbs, after all, made about $2 million in speech fees in his first year and a half outside the White House.

LeBron Cantor, meanwhile, is weighing his options and having discussions about his future. (Just not with me; he declined to comment for this article.) Needless to say, he’s probably not talking to anyone about returning to Richmond to start a law firm, say, or volunteer at an orphanage. When I mentioned that notion to a lobbyist friend, he burst out laughing. If that happens, he said, he would buy me dinner at Bobby Van’s.

Mark Leibovich, author of “This Town,” is the magazine’s chief national correspondent.